Fell had the idea that he would use his connections in Pennsylvania to plant articles “manufacturing sentiment in your favor” as a potential candidate. He explained to Lincoln that Republicans in Pennsylvania would run Simon Cameron as a favorite son, but that he was unacceptable “and will be dropped.” He asked Lincoln to tell him the details of his life story for publication. “Won’t you do it?”
“Fell, I admit the force of much that you say, and admit that I am ambitious, and would like to be President. I am not insensible to the compliment you pay me, and the interest you manifest in the matter; but there is no such good luck in store for me as the presidency of these United States; besides, there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else; and, as Judge Davis says, ‘it won’t pay.’ Good night.” Fell accepted Lincoln’s rejection of “my pet scheme” for the moment, but not as final. “I notified him, however, as his giant form, wrapped in a dilapidated shawl, disappeared in the darkness, that this was not the last of it; that the facts must come.”
On November 24, Congressman Thomas L. Harris, Douglas’s indispensable ally who represented the Sangamon County district, died after a long battle with tuberculosis. He had been bedridden, spitting up blood for weeks—“this melancholy event has been anticipated for some months,” reported the Illinois State Journal. Trumbull encouraged Lincoln to run for the vacant seat. “It would certainly be a great triumph and have a most happy effect in the future if you could be returned from the district right on the eve of a four thousand majority against us,” he wrote. Lincoln had no interest in launching himself into a campaign he might well lose, nor in lowering his sights at once from the Senate to the House. “I have not the slightest thought of being a candidate for Congress,” he replied to Trumbull on December 11. Lincoln’s friend, James C. Conkling, with whom he had served years ago in the legislature and was a member of the Republican State Committee, was slated as the party’s candidate, and was defeated on January 4, 1859.
On the evening of January 5, 1859, the eve of Douglas’s foreordained election by the legislature the next day, an inner group of Republicans met with Lincoln in the capitol’s law library to discuss how to “keep the party afloat,” according to Henry Clay Whitney. They were especially upset “in view of the defection of Greeley—the endorsement of Douglas.” Lincoln, of course, was there. So were state auditor Jesse K. Dubois, John M. Palmer (a former state senator who had presided over the Bloomington convention), Joe Gillespie, state senator Norman Judd, Ebenezer Peck (just elected to the legislature), Jackson Grimshaw (a Quincy lawyer and old Lincoln friend), Secretary of State Ozias Hatch, Whitney, and perhaps some others. “I am decidedly in favor of maintaining the party, and I see no valid reason for discouragement,” said Palmer to general agreement. At the conclusion of Dubois’s remarks, he added, “And I am also in favor of putting Lincoln up for a place on the ticket, either for President or Vice-President—one or the other.” According to Whitney the “sentiment was cheered,” Lincoln gave “a modest speech, which ended, ‘As to the matter of my name on the National ticket’—when he was stopped by several of us; and he subsided.” According to another account from R.W. Miles, a Republican from Knox County, who sat in “the secret caucus meeting,” Lincoln responded to the call for his candidacy by rising to his feet and exclaiming, “For God’s sake, let me alone! I have suffered enough!” But according to Judge Davis, after various names of possible presidential contenders were raised, Lincoln spoke up. “Why don’t you run me?” Lincoln asked. “I can be nominated, I can be elected, and I can run the government.” David Davis was surprised. “We all looked at him and saw that he was not joking,” he said later.
Shortly after the election, at a reception given by Governor Bissell, “Mr. Lincoln was standing near the center of the room, entirely alone, with his usual sad countenance, and apparently unnoticed by anyone,” recalled Elijah M. Haines, a legislator and Lincoln supporter. “I said to my wife, ‘Here is Mr. Lincoln; he looks as if he had lost all his friends; come and have an introduction to him, and cheer him up.’ ” Lincoln invited Mrs. Haines to dance. “He had occasion during their conversation to refer to his age, remarking incidentally that he was almost fifty years old; whereupon, as if suddenly reflecting that his age was a good part of a man’s life, and as if unwilling to relinquish his hold upon the future, he suddenly braced himself up, and said, ‘But, Mrs. Haines, I feel that I am good for another fifty years yet.’ ”
A few months later, that spring, Haines recalled another conversation with Lincoln. “It would seem that the original intention of Lincoln’s friends had been to bring him out as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency,” he wrote. Haines sought to encourage Lincoln, “referring to his growing reputation, I remarked to him that I did not know that we would be able to make him President, but perhaps we could do the next best thing, and make him Vice-President. He brightened up somewhat, and answered by a story which I do not clearly recall, but the application of which was that he scarcely considered himself a big enough man for President, while the Vice-Presidency was scarcely big enough office for one who had aspired to a seat in the Senate of the United States.”
At the onset of the Senate campaign Illinois Republicans were overwhelmingly inclined to support Seward for the presidential nomination in 1860. After the campaign they were infuriated at Eastern Republicans for flirting with Douglas and looking for an alternative of their own. Only a month before the election Seward seemed a simple number one choice to Herndon writing to Theodore Parker on October 4: “you say you are, 1st, for Seward; 2nd, for Chase, and 3rd, for Senator Trumbull, if, etc.; and in answer to this, I say ‘we of the West have no choice—we do not care who it is, so that he is a good Republican.’ ” Even then, Herndon was irritated at Greeley. “Greeley is acting a great dog, is he not? Just look at the power of his great paper, with its world-wide circulation, and does he state who he is for, what he wants, what Illinois is doing, what freedom is struggling for, and how, with intensity, etc.? Nothing of the kind. He does not seem to know there is such a man as Lincoln, such a struggle as 1858–9, and such a State as Illinois. Does he keep his own people ‘posted’? Who would know by Greeley’s paper that a great race for weal or woe was being fought all over the wide prairies of Illinois? Who would? It is strange indeed!”
Just days after Lincoln’s loss the Illinois Republican deference to Seward turned into a rage. Herndon wrote Parker on November 8: “Greeley never gave us one single, solitary, manly lift. On the contrary, his silence was his opposition. This our people felt. We never got a smile or a word of encouragement outside of Illinois from any quarter during all this great canvass. The East was for Douglas by silence. This silence was terrible to us. Seward was against us too.”
Herndon’s conflation of Greeley and Seward was more than a little ironic given their bad blood. Greeley had been hailing Douglas in his paper while Seward operated quietly in the Senate cloakroom and Washington drawing rooms encouraging Douglas, but he endorsed neither him nor Lincoln. Seward’s game was played behind the scenes to enhance Douglas’s destruction of Buchanan, widen the split within the Democratic Party, making Douglas’s nomination and election that much more difficult, and Seward’s that much more likely. The New York Times, read by Illinois Republicans as close to Seward, described the “Triumph of Douglas” as “one of the most wonderful personal victories ever achieved by a public man . . . against the Republicans on the one hand and the Administration on the other, with the greatest firmness and self-reliance.”
Toward the end of the campaign, on October 25, before a sympathetic audience in Rochester, Seward delivered the most consequential speech he ever made. He was not running for reelection, but he addressed a double purpose, one local, to heighten the antislavery message while diminishing the nativists in New York, and one national, to assert his primacy as the preeminent voice of the Republican Party and by that the presumptive presidential nominee. “Our country is a theater,” he said
, “which exhibits in full operation two radically different political systems—the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of freemen. . . . Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.” He further declared, “It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free States, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.”
In New York, the speech was instrumental in solidifying his base. Seward described his dramatic effect to James Watson Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, a longtime supporter who had even named a son after Seward. “I saw a reserve Republican power of 70,000 to 80,000 in state in the rural districts who had slept two years since the last Presidential Campaign, betraying the state to the Democratic party last year, needing to be roused with a battle cry that they could respond to.” The Republicans swept the state, winning for governor, a large majority in the legislature, and all but four congressional seats. But Seward’s statement of an “irrepressible conflict” indelibly marked him as a radical, an easy target of Southerners, and vulnerable to future divisive events. He never escaped his phrase.
Seward’s speech conversely was used to rouse the Southern Ultras. The fire-eating Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia, looking forward to the 1860 election, announced that Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech was an incitement to secession. “The election of a Northern President, upon a sectional and anti-slavery issue, will be considered cause enough to justify secession. Let the Senator from New York, or any other man avowing the sentiments and policy enunciated by him in his Rochester speech, be elected President of the United States, and, in my opinion, there are more than one of the Southern States that would take immediate steps toward separation. And, sir, I am free to declare here, in the Senate, that whenever such an event shall occur, for one, I shall be for disunion!”
Senator Hammond of South Carolina warned, “The South is to be Africanized and the elections of 1860 are to decide the question . . . it is to be emancipation or disunion after 1860, unless Seward is repudiated.”
Herndon, while angry about Seward to Parker, wrote a praiseworthy letter to Seward on December 18, observing the parallel to Lincoln’s “house divided” speech and appearing to boost Seward’s presidential candidacy, urging him to “seize some golden opportunity.” Herndon was trying to ingratiate himself with the man he still regarded as the Republican candidate. Seward replied with a nice little perfunctory letter: “No one can regret more than I do the failure of Mr. Lincoln’s election.” Giving Lincoln no more mind, complacent about his inevitability, Seward left on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East from which he did not return until December 1859.
The fury in Illinois against the Eastern Republicans hardly abated, but burned to a white heat, especially against Greeley. The Chicago Press and Tribune, on February 2, 1859, published a lead editorial ripping “the criminal folly of the New York Tribune in still clinging to the coat tails of that politician”—Douglas. “While the Illinois election was pending we looked for the hostility of the Tribune against the Republican candidates, though we did not look for it in the back-door, round-the-corner fashion in which it came. . . . But now that the election is passed and Mr. Douglas has avowedly returned to his vomit, it is amazing beyond all things that the Tribune should still hang to his skirts.” The Chicago voice for Lincoln warned that the Senate race was not the end of the contest. “Our complaint lies here; that having helped to do serious harm to the Republican cause in the West, his obstinacy will not suffer him to retrace a step nor even to pause midway in his wild career. It is quite as consistent to give aid and comfort to Mr. Douglas now, while he is turning the crank of the pro-slavery machine, as during the campaign when he was only promising to . . . whoever embarks in the enterprise of sneering down the Republican creed of this State or the Republican candidate for the Senate, will find blows to take as well as blows to give while we remain in the management of newspaper columns.”
Lincoln returned to his law practice. He had lost a good deal of business during his campaign and depleted his funds. “This year I must devote to my private business,” he wrote declining an invitation to give a speech at a distant agricultural fair. So, he took on cases of debt collection, railroads, and murder. But his eye was fixed on politics. Just as he attended to his clients he did not neglect political business near and far. His situation was the opposite of what it had been a decade earlier, in 1849, when he came back from Washington after his single term in the Congress bearing unpopularity for being against the Mexican War, feeling the political world closed to him, and despairing he was trapped. Now Lincoln politely refused to acknowledge he was running for any office, much less the presidency, while intervening strategically to position the state and national Republican Party for the 1860 election. The rumors about him were extremely helpful. It was highly unlikely he might gain the nomination, but he might be named the running mate, and, no matter what, the publicity kept alive his prospect of challenging Douglas for the Senate in 1864. He was the leading man of the Illinois party determined to play out the role.
Lincoln always maintained his focus on Douglas. His competition never ended. He considered his rival no less unscrupulous, ruthless, and wily, his slipperiness not necessarily grasped even by those Southern Democrats who despised him. A month after the election, on December 11, Lincoln laid out scenarios to Trumbull about Douglas through 1860 in which he would wreak damage on naive Republicans after feckless Democrats failed to subdue him. “Since you left,” Lincoln wrote,
Douglas has gone South, making characteristic speeches, and seeking to re-instate himself in that section. The majority of the democratic politicians of the nation mean to kill him; but I doubt whether they will adopt the aptest way to do it. Their true way is to present him with no new test, let him into the Charleston [Democratic] Convention, and then outvote him, and nominate another. In that case, he will have no pretext for bolting the nomination, and will be as powerless as they can wish. On the other hand, if they push a Slave code upon him, as a test, he will bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power. In that case, the democratic party go into a minority inevitably; and the struggle in the whole North will be, as it was in Illinois last summer and fall, whether the Republican party can maintain its identity, or be broken up to form the tail of Douglas’ new kite. . . . The truth is, the Republican principle can, in no wise live with Douglas; and it is arrant folly now, as it was last Spring, to waste time, and scatter labor already performed, in dallying with him.
On March 1, Lincoln spoke to a rally of Republicans in Chicago on the eve of a city election, his first speech since the Senate election, to call for caution against the fatal danger Douglas posed to the cause, “so long as we all agree that this matter of slavery is a moral, political, and social wrong, and ought to be treated as a wrong, not to let anything minor or subsidiary to that main principle and purpose make us fail to cooperate.” The siren song of the Eastern Republicans that urged the embrace of Douglas, he declared, would lead to the destruction of the new party. “I have believed,” said Lincoln, “that in the Republican situation in Illinois, if we, the Republicans of this State, had made Judge Douglas our candidate for the Senate of the United States last year and had elected him, there would to-day be no Republican party in this Union. I believed that the principles around which we have rallied and organized that party would live; they will live under a
ll circumstances, while we will die. They would reproduce another party in the future. But in the meantime all the labor that has been done to build up the present Republican party would be entirely lost, and perhaps twenty years of time, before we would again have formed around that principle as solid, extensive, and formidable an organization as we have, standing shoulder to shoulder to-night in harmony and strength around the Republican banner.”
Lincoln constantly found new ways to restate why Republicans must never allow themselves to be seduced by Douglas. “The Republican principle, the profound central truth that slavery is wrong and ought to be dealt with as a wrong, though we are always to remember the fact of its actual existence amongst us and faithfully observe all the constitutional guarantees—the unalterable principle never for a moment to be lost sight of that it is a wrong and ought to be dealt with as such, cannot advance at all upon Judge Douglas’ ground—that there is a portion of the country in which slavery must always exist; that he does not care whether it is voted up or voted down, as it is simply a question of dollars and cents. Whenever, in any compromise or arrangement or combination that may promise some temporary advantage, we are led upon that ground, then and there the great living principle upon which we have organized as a party is surrendered.”
Again and again, he hammered at his ultimate point of the conflict between right and wrong, between principle and Douglas. “I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end. If we do not allow ourselves to be allured from the strict path of our duty by such a device as shifting our ground and throwing ourselves into the rear of a leader who denies our first principle, denies that there is an absolute wrong in the institution of slavery, then the future of the Republican cause is safe and victory is assured.”
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